The Lost Language of Cranes: A Novel

by David Leavitt

  "May I speak to the owner?" she said.

  "We don't deliver," the child said.

  "No, I'm not calling about that," Jerene said. "I'm interested in some information about the former owner, and I need to speak to the present owner."

  Then there was silence on the line, followed by a stern female voice with a Jamaican accent.

  "I don't know about the lady was here before," the woman said. "I been here three years now and I don't know nothing."

  "Her name was Nellie Parks," Jerene said. "Please. It's important. I'm her granddaughter, and I have to find her."

  "I'm very busy," the woman said. "No time. What you want it for?"

  "I'm her granddaughter," Jerene repeated. "There's a family emergency, and I must get in touch with her."

  The lady sighed. In the background Jerene could hear dryers churning. "Well, maybe I have something," she said finally. "You just hold on."

  She left Jerene holding the phone for about five minutes, and then she got back on and said, "Eighteen fifty-four South Forty-fifth, and that's all I know. Goodbye."

  "Is there a phone number?"

  There was. The woman recited it and hung up.

  "I'm really sorry," Laura said. "I can't believe it, but there's just panic shooting through me, just at the idea of it. Feel my heart." She sat paralyzed on the sofa.

  Jerene dialed the number. A voice that reminded her of the computer on "Star Trek" picked up and said, "Pinebrook Home."

  She breathed deeply and asked the question.

  Mr. Parks, the voice was sorry to report, had passed on last year, but Mrs. Parks was still a resident.

  Jerene asked for visiting hours. Every day between ten and five, the voice said.

  "Thank you," Jerene said, and hung up.

  She went on a Friday, riding through Queens on the Long Island Railroad into the very first fringe of suburbs. It was a brisk, sunny day—the kind of March weather that seems somehow fraudulent, hinting at the possibility of a snowstorm the next afternoon. Children were jumping rope and riding bicycles enthusiastically on the small, quiet streets she walked to the nursing home. There were even some sunbathers lying on chaises on the small lawns, their skin white with cold, braced against the breeze, diehards determined to enjoy this first sunny day even if it killed them.

  It surprised her to be walking through a neighborhood of houses. So many years had passed since she had last gone home, so many months since she'd stepped off the island of Manhattan, that she had practically forgotten that smell of grass she was smelling now, the tender, green gentleness of a suburb after school lets out. Here, residential streets formed a grid with big avenues filled with supermarkets and little shopping malls, and nothing was taller than a few stories. Red brick houses, all alike, lined South Forty-fifth Street like sentries, and at the end was the Pinebrook Home for the Aged. When she entered, a whoosh of circulating air was sucked out of the automatic doors. The smell of vomit did not surprise Jerene. At the front desk she asked for Mrs. Parks's room, and a vacant-eyed girl in a nurse's uniform looked it up: room 2119.

  She took the elevator. A hallway whose pale yellow walls were illuminated by pale yellow lightbulbs stretched before her, full of elderly women in their bathrobes, some in wheelchairs, some with walkers. They gave her frank, suspicious stares. In a little lounge area, others, fully dressed, almost elegant-looking in their outmoded finery, watched a rock video on a big television screen. With the help of a floor map attached to one of the walls, she made her way to room 2119. A television blared through the open door. Inside were two neatly made beds, two bureaus, and two armchairs, both empty. An elderly woman in a darkly patterned housedress, a black patent-leather purse slung over one arm, was sitting in a small desk-chair in the corner, watching television.

  "Get it through your head, Mother," said a voice from the television. "Holly and I are going to be married, and that's final."

  There was a cascade of music, the slamming of a door. Another voice whispered, "Over my dead body." Then more music. "I don't give my cat any old cat food," declared a new, different voice, and Jerene nervously crept into the room.

  "Hello?" she said.

  The old woman started, and stood up from where she sat. "Excuse me," she said, her voice high with offense.

  Jerene stepped back. "I didn't mean to startle you," she said. "I'm sorry. I—Grandma, it's me. Jerene."

  From where she stood, the old woman looked up, her mouth closed tightly.

  "I came to visit you. I thought I'd surprise you."

  "Jerene?" the old woman said.

  "Yes. Your granddaughter."

  Her grandmother's face melted. Tears came to her eyes. "Jerene," she said gently.

  "Don't cry, Grandma," Jerene said, coming toward her. "Sit down here, in this chair."

  "I'm just so surprised. Thank you. You can't know. I—I never expected to see you again. Sam only calls the last Saturday every month, and—goodness, I can't remember the last time he and Maggie came to visit."

  Jerene had never heard her mother called Maggie before.

  "I thought you'd gone away," Nellie said. "I thought—oh, it was ages ago that—you'd gone off to Africa, joined the Peace Corps. And then they told me you'd married someone there, you weren't coming back."

  Jerene smiled. "Well, I'm back now."

  "Did you have a good time in Africa?"

  Jerene nodded.

  "And how are your children?" She closed her eyes. "Oh don't tell me—let me remember. I know Maggie wrote me all about them. Let's see: Sam Jr. And what was the girl's name? Elizabeth?"

  Jerene nodded. "Yes. Elizabeth."

  "Are they with you? "

  "No, they're there. In Africa."

  "With their father?"

  "Yes. He's taking care of them."

  "Well, it's too bad. I would have liked to have met my great-grandchildren. Oh," said Nellie, "I—I wish I could offer you something. A cup of tea. Some cookies. But I don't keep much around, not since Sam passed on. You know, of course, your grandfather passed on last May, don't you?"

  "Yes, I heard. I was very sorry."

  "He was so sick," Nellie said. "It was a blessing, really. Tell me, how's your father and mother? They haven't been to see me since I can't remember, and when they do come, it's like they're not even here. To tell you the truth," she said, leaning toward Jerene confidentially, "I feel like I haven't known them in years. Ever since they moved to Eastport, or wherever it was." She looked Jerene sternly in the eye. "When was the last time I saw you? I wouldn't have recognized you. That haircut you've got—is that the fashion in Africa?"

  "Yes."

  On the television set a couple was kissing passionately. "My program," Nellie said, and reached for her glasses. "Do you get the soap operas?"

  "No, I don't watch much."

  For a moment, their attention was focused on the screen. "Just think," a young, dark-haired man was saying to a pretty blond girl. "Only two more days and you'll be my wife."

  "It won't happen," Nellie said sullenly. "The mother's out to stop it. Too bad. I get so worried when something bad's about to happen. A woman down the hall, she wrote to the network and asked them to tell her if everything was going to turn out all right for Steve and Kitty, in case she died before she found out? They sent back a form letter. Now she's worried all the time. But I say, it's a way to stay alive, right? It's something to live for."

  Now the young couple were embracing again. A door blew open. Another young woman walked in, and the couple pulled apart.

  "The last time you saw me," Jerene said, "I think it must have been my eighteenth birthday party. Remember? But what's most special to me—I visited you in the laundromat. I remember you let me put the quarters in the machines and push the levers in myself."

  "Oh, all the little girls liked that," Nellie said. "Not me. It was a hard life. Not like the life you had, growing up in that big house with all those nice things. Look, there's the mother. She is out to make
trouble for everyone else. No joy herself, has to take everybody else's away, I guess."

  They watched the mother scheme for a few minutes. Then Jerene said, "Grandma? Do you think Daddy and Mommy will be visiting you soon?"

  Nellie turned and faced her. "I don't know," she said. "Could you bring them?"

  Jerene smiled. "We aren't getting along too well these days," she admitted.

  "That's too bad," Nellie said. But her eyes were veering toward the television and finally, after giving Jerene a knowing, mischievous grin, she gave herself up wholly to indulgence until a commercial came on.

  Now Nellie re-arranged herself in the armchair. "I'm grateful to have my program," she said to Jerene. "I don't have much of a life here anymore. But this—this is just like a life. It happens every day—except for the weekends. The weekends are hard, especially when they've had a big cliff-hanger on Friday. Usually I can tell when a big cliff-hanger's coming up as early as Tuesday. You know they're building up to something bad. The weekend that Jenny was on the operating table I couldn't sleep a wink."

  When the program started again, Jerene said, "Grandma, I have to go now."

  "Oh so soon? But you just came."

  "I don't want to interrupt your program," Jerene continued. "Now that I know, I'll come back to visit you at a more convenient time."

  "Oh, I feel so rude," Nellie said. "But my program is so important to me. Now tell me again—when are you going back to Africa?"

  "Not for a while."

  There was a loud crashing noise. On the television a car swerved to avoid collision, and then the screen went dark and a phone was ringing—whether on the show or in the real world Jerene couldn't tell. "Oh dear," Nellie said. "What's happened? Who was in that car?"

  "Goodbye," Jerene said. But Nellie was lost in private anxiety and did not answer. Quietly Jerene moved out the door, leaving a vase of flowers and a box of candy on the bureau.

  Her eyes felt heavy as she rode down in the elevator, as if caked with scrapings from the yellow walls of the hallways. She thought she might throw up from the smell of the food, and ran toward the exit. But when she moved through the heavy glass doors and out onto the street, it was as if the wind blew the scrapings away, bruised her alive again.

  She did not think as she walked to the train station. She did not think as she changed trains at Jamaica, and changed trains again at Woodside. Indeed, only when she was under the familiar ground of Manhattan did she allow herself to remember the hidden fact, the tiny grain of knowledge. Maggie. Never in her life had she heard her mother called Maggie. It was a name from that dead time Jerene had never been allowed to talk about, that ugly origin which, when she brought it up, her mother shooed away like a fly: "Just be grateful for what you have," she'd say, as if in scolding, and immediately insist on buying Jerene a dress. No joy herself, has to take everyone else's away. Her mother was Margaret now. And when the ladies asked about her daughter, she invented a husband in Africa, and two beautiful grandchildren, Sam Jr. and Elizabeth. Elizabeth was Jerene's middle name, and sometimes, when they were alone, Margaret had called her Elizabeth. Jerene had been her father's idea, the name of his own grandmother, and she wondered if he had given it to her as a last offering to the pyre of his past, his part in a bargain that would guarantee her protection from everything the name meant.

  When she got home, Laura was waiting for her on the sofa in the kitchen, chewing gum, one stockinged leg curled under her buttocks. "There's tea," she said. "I've made some really wonderful cookies."

  "Just tea," Jerene said.

  She poured the tea herself and sat silently on the sofa.

  "What happened?" Laura said.

  "I saw her."

  "Oh wow," Laura said. "Was it okay?"

  Jerene smiled and touched her hair, which was of course such a popular style in Africa.

  "Yes," she said. "It was okay." She looked like she was about to cry. "Oh sweetheart, come here," Laura said, and taking Jerene into her embrace, held her there, silent, while the afternoon drained away.

  IN THE DARK of her Sunday afternoon living room, cool through closed curtains, Rose searched a giant atlas for a six-letter Indonesian island known for its dragon lizard: blank-blank-blank-O-blank-blank. So far she had found "Tidore" and "Misool," both of which, once fit into the crossword puzzle, created more problems than they solved. But there were still many tiny islands to the north left to explore. She pressed on. She imagined herself a little cartoon captain maneuvering a crossword-patterned boat through a sea of words. She had finished the regular puzzle and was now doing the acrostic. Slowly, as she worked, a quotation was beginning to appear in the diagram, like a photograph emerging from darkroom fluids. Words that a moment ago made no sense were blossoming into comprehensibility, as when the G from GEORGE ELIOT transformed M—PI into MAGPIE. At the end, she knew, she would be presented with a whole thing—a coherent quotation, the tide and author of which could be found by lining up the first letters of all the answers to the clues—and it was this she longed for. The meshing of meanings, the knitting of one set of words into another: It all made sense as a curative principle. And she wondered, suddenly, if all copy editors, encyclopedists, cartographers, crossword puzzle editors, were people who had stumbled into their careers because they desperately needed to forget things all the time. "The vultures of the thinking world," Owen had once called them, feeding on the leftovers of thought, on what remained after the great documents of history and science were pared down to reasonable size. As Rose was learning, such carrion was better than alcohol. This benign, useless activity literally tied up the brain; it blocked panic. In a burst of bitter energy, Rose thrust Thomas Mann and Timon of Athens into the fray. She fired out synonyms like bullets. But at the end her head ached horribly, as if her skull were a swollen, empty thing. The neatly completed puzzle had absorbed all order; her life remained as it was.

  It was four o'clock. Owen, out somewhere, doing something, had invited a young teacher from Harte home for dinner. Thursday, at breakfast, he had said to her, "Rose, I forgot to tell you—I invited that young English teacher to dinner Sunday night, remember the one I told you about? He's lonely, I think, and needs a home-cooked meal. Do you mind?" What could she have said? The invitation had already been extended. And anyway, she was in some ways grateful to Owen for inviting the teacher. The presence of a stranger, she knew, would let her off the hook with Philip. He could not give her those pleading looks across the table—looks she could not bear.

  She went to D'Agostino's. The air-conditioning blew her hair and numbed her face. She pushed her cart down the bright aisle of vegetables, arranged in fancy wicker baskets to reflect the market's new upscale image. As always, the place was full of women picking among the mounds of papayas and mangoes, their little babies' legs sticking through the slats of the carts. As a little boy Philip had loved it when she rode him in her shopping cart, had kept begging her to do it as late as his sixth birthday, when he was far too big, and it would have embarrassed her to be seen pushing him. She had not been an indulgent mother, not like some women she knew. One day she simply said, "No Philip, you're too big, and that's that." He looked at her, dumbfounded at first, and dragged at her leg as she maneuvered the aisles of the supermarket, trying to kick him off. This very supermarket.

  But she was not going to think about Philip. She concentrated on pulling cucumbers, tomatoes, and squash from the bins, then turned the aisle, where a little girl was frantically trying to reconstruct a pyramid of toilet paper that she had accidentally toppled. "I said all of it," her mother commanded. Nearby, stuck in a corner, a haggard-looking woman not much older than Rose droned, "Free sample of low-calorie cheese spread, have a free sample of low-calorie cheese spread." She was wearing a stained hound's-tooth dress made from some sort of shimmering material. Across from her, a younger black woman, a girl really, dressed in tight spandex pants, was demonstrating a new kind of quick-cooking bacon at a little frying-station while a group of wo
men watched desultorily. Rose stopped and gazed for a moment as the girl inexpertly turned the red strips. She would have liked to join the women, would have liked to have been able to absorb herself in so innocent a thing as bacon-frying. But it was too late for that now. She moved on to the checkout stand, where an electronic eye automatically calculated the prices of her purchases.

  Having arranged for the groceries to be delivered, she went to Barnes & Noble. In the self-help section were many cozy books on self-assertion, how to put the zest back in your sex life, the Cinderella Complex. She looked through them feverishly. A couple of young women stood at the rack, absorbed in a book called Go For It. They were in their twenties, chewing gum; secretaries probably. They were genuinely interested in improving themselves. The sight of them made Rose feel fleetingly good, as she remembered the doldrums of her own life, those not-too-distant days when she too had had the luxury of worrying about whether she was going for it or was a victim of the Cinderella Complex. Those days had passed. What she needed now was a book telling her how to live in rubble.

  Once, about five, maybe seven years ago, she had had a cancer scare—a mysterious lump in her back which, as it turned out, was nothing, a knot of fat. Still, in those first, terror-stricken days, she found herself perpetually drawn on her lunch hour to the "Health" section at Dalton's, where she flipped frantically through a book of symptoms, looking enviously at everything that was not a mysterious fatty lump embedded in the flesh of the back, covetous of fatigue, a sore throat, a mysterious exhaustion after meals. She would have embraced hypoglycemia if it meant she didn't have cancer. And indeed, she didn't have cancer, or hypoglycemia either. Thus she walked out of the doctor's office breathy with joy, shaking, and felt that classic surge of appreciation for the smallest things—for a tree bending toward the sun in a patch of sidewalk grass, for a woman crossing the avenue with twins in a carriage. But not for long. Those moments of the most intense pleasure, those moments for which she felt nostalgia at the same instant she was living them—they were brief indeed. Soon the business of life caught up with her, caught her up. Years passed. It was as if she'd been asleep. She looked once again at the symptom book. And once again she remembered who it had been, walking through her door on a normal night, full of news, eager to wake her.